Latest revision as of 22:22, 30 July 2006

This article is based on the work of nix from www.linkstationwiki.org

In case you somehow obtained an .ipk package which you want to install, but if you don't have the ipkg package management system installed (or it is not working), the following are the steps to manually install an .ipk package:

Become root

su -

Download the package. E.g.

mkdir /tmp/inst
cd /tmp/inst
wget http://url-of-package/package.ipk

Unpack the ipk outer wrapper

tar xvfz package.ipk

Unpack the control file

tar xvfz control.tar.gz

Look for scripts such as preinst and postinst

Run the preinst script, if any

./preinst

Unpack the main tarball under /

cd /
tar xvfz /tmp/inst/data.tar.gz

Run the postinst script, if any

cd /tmp/inst
./postinst

Cleanup

cd /tmp
rm -rf inst

The above commands just peels of the different archive wrappers, as explained in the other ipkg articles, and unpacks the files into the file tree. What it doesn't do is to record what has been installed. So uninstalling the data can be quite cumbersome.